In His Paris Apartment, Alexis Mabille Creates a Singular Universe

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/31/t-magazine/alexis-mabille-home-paris.html

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As a young boy in Lyon, the French fashion designer Alexis Mabille spent hours pillaging his aunt’s trove of tattered 19th-century clothes, stitching elaborate costumes from the assemblage of velvets, petticoats and laces from faded heirlooms. In his teenage years, in between stitching custom bridal gowns for friends of the family with the help of his mother, he accompanied his uncle, the interior architect Patrice Nourissat, on trips to Paris flea markets in search of antiques, textiles and other treasures. Nourissat’s Belle Époque villa in the south of France, Rocabella — with its vaulted ceilings and dramatic seaside garden — made a lasting impression on Mabille when he first saw it at age 20. “For many years, I thought about whether to go into fashion or architecture,” says Mabille, now 41. In 1995 the decision made itself, when he was accepted into the École de la Chambre Syndicale de la Couture in Paris.

Mabille went on to work for John Galliano at Christian Dior, where he spent almost a decade designing jewelry. And in 2005 he started his own label, beginning with a collection of unisex jackets, trousers, white shirting and bow ties (the latter is still a brand signature), while also creating custom-order suiting on the side for clients like Sofia Coppola and her husband, the Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars. Three years later he returned to his first love — gowns — starting a couture line and expanding his women’s ready-to-wear business to include boldly colored dresses and gamine daywear. But throughout this, Mabille’s appreciation of antique textiles and grand interiors remained undimmed. “My uncle taught me how to respect the spirit of decoration,” Mabille says. “You want to create a universe in a home that’s comfortable.”

Then, in 2015, after renting for decades, Mabille began orchestrating his own ideal universe in a Directoire-era apartment in Paris’s Ninth Arrondissement. The space had been completely stripped of its original details, and Mabille saw an opportunity to recreate its lost grandeur, but through a whimsical lens. He enlisted his friends Emil Humbert and Christophe Poyet of the Monaco-based architecture firm Humbert & Poyet (they also designed Mabille’s mirrored Art Deco-style shop in the Seventh Arrondissement) to collaborate with him on the project, rebuilding it in the style of late-18th-century France. In this fractious, fragile era — during the last years of the Revolution, just before the installation of the Republic — interior decoration reflected both the near past and the imminent future. The neo-Classical opulence and gilt of the Louis XVI look was giving way to a slightly subdued version of itself — carvings on wooden furniture became less intricate, cotton was favored over silk, and the use of gold leaf was minimized.

The bones of Mabille’s apartment allude to that so-called Directoire style. Square-blocked neo-Classical-style ceiling moldings — a nod to the global fascination with the excavation of the ancient Roman city of Pompeii, which began in 1748 — distinguish the ceilings; sets of molded classic French doors trimmed in gold leaf divide the space. In the living room, natural and black-stained oak planks line the floor in a traditional chevron pattern, and in the kitchen, a row of four gilt sconces sit opposite custom white marble cabinetry commissioned by Humbert and Poyet. Contrasting with these elements are bold contemporary pieces, antiques from a range of eras, and some of Mabille’s family heirlooms (oil paintings, Louis XVI furniture). In the entryway, a hyper-colorful 2010 Xavier Tronel painting disrupts the gracious Dior-gray entryway and in the bedroom, 1970s pea-green armchairs sit against crimson and green brocade curtains constructed from a 19th-century tapestry from the Château de Saint-Victor in the Loire Valley.

But the apartment’s true standout pieces might be those Mabille designed himself. In the jewel-toned living room, an emerald-colored velvet sofa is stitched with scraps from his collection of vintage tapestries — a mix of irreverent 1950s and ’60s embroideries featuring flora and fauna scenes — found over 10 years of flea market hunting in the south of France, London and Lyon. “I love the idea of telling a story with a piece of furniture,” says Mabille, who was inspired by a chestnut velvet sofa inlaid with a patchwork of tapestries designed by the architect Pierre Chareau for the historic 1930s Paris townhouse known as the Maison de Verre. “After I pick up a new snip of fabric, I organize it into a working collage to make a pattern. It’s like painting.” There’s also a hefty rectangular coffee table crafted from a single slab of red Languedoc marble, which the designer says reminds him of a raw piece of meat with its russet-and-white swirl pattern.

Mabille has been making furniture for himself and his friends for years — tapestry sofas, metal and colored marble side tables — but intends to make it official this fall, working with the Paris-based design dealer Aurelie Julien to sell his pieces by commission. “I’d like to only make a few things for the right person, for the right apartment,” Mabille says. “I want to know who it’s going home with.”